It's EA's customer portal that is trying to be Steam. It has had some problems. Plus a bevy of security flaws and it was a mandatory download for a while (no idea if it still is, i was forced to download it when i tried TOR and then deleted it once i stopped playing the game).

Origin has come a ways since that article but it still has a bunch of flaws that'll keep it from really competing with Steam. It doesn't have the same selection of titles that Steam does, while it occasionally has sales they're not as often or as big as Steam's, and it's UI just isn't as well put together. It's better than uPlay. One cool thing that EA did do with Origin is that there are a handful of pre-Origin retail games that you can punch the cd-key into Origin and add them to your Origin library and download directly from them (Mirror's Edge and the Dead Space games are the ones that I had that allowed this). It also has the integrated twitch.tv livestreaming, which is pretty cool if you're into that.

So I finally got around to playing XCOM multiplayer, and basically got my ass handed to me by some ten year old from the US. Squad balance is real hard. Or at least that's my excuse. Did win some matches when I played again last night. My XBL nick is the same as my nick here if anyone wants to play chryssalid-chess with me (and win, probably).

Ok, just beat XCOM last night and whoever up thread said the game got to them based on the stories you create for yourself regarding your squaddies, all I have to say is they were right and god damn. 8(

I'm rather hesitant on it. I haven't seen much to suggest they've been able to put it all together in a way that is interesting. At this point I expect it to be a reasonably competent game that no one will remember six months after it launched.

It seems to be a third person squad shooter now, like the Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter games. One to keep an eye on, but I suspect everyone will be playing Saints Row or GTA for most of the next couple of months.

Disney Infinity is out next week, and my local gameshop has the toys in already. They're bigger than I was expecting, on the same sort of scale as the Skylanders Giants figures rather than the normal Skylanders. This one is apparently make or break for Disney's games division, they've put insane amounts of money into it.

Just got Crusader Kings 2 from a friend (as he pre-ordered something that came with a free copy) and, well, I started a game at noon yesterday and eventually went to bed at 6am. Despite that, I'm not sure what to think of it. It's mechanically fascinating but some of the tasks you need to do regularly, eg. finding a good choice of spouse for one of your children, force you to scroll through a vast list of terrible candidates that won't sort properly. They even have a people finder with dropdown filters, it's basically the same box, but it comes up without the filters if you use it via any other button.On the other hand, I just spent 16 hours being a belligerent little sod of a Polish duke, eventually getting hold of a faked claim to the throne and storming through with mercenaries. People keep forming factions to depose me, presumably because I sort of stole the throne, but I've managed to make Poland about as big as Norway at this point. I figure I'll just keep going until I get to be emperor of something or until I misunderstand succession rules and half my territory turns Scottish (or whatever).

@Flabyo I'm friends with Bill Roper and he's, unsurprisingly, had some very good things to say about it. I wouldn't say that it's make or break for the games division but I would say that if this doesn't do as well as they hope it will make things a lot harder on Bill to bring to market the kind of games he'd like to.

Holy crap, Mirror's Edge took a shit on itself in a serious way; turned the graphics settings all the way down, and still the framerate slows down to completely unplayable levels. In the second level. And only in this one section (in the high rise, after talking to her sister, in case it is a common problem). Otherwise, I really enjoyed what I've gotten to play.